Dear Communication Design Students,
A word of warning about printers. Bribe, plead, cajole, beg or beat the university printers into giving you what you want. Commercial Printers will charge you through the nose. I did it all but the uni printers would not cooperate this time.
This is how I beat being charged through the nose the day before my assignments are/were due.
1. Draw a mental radius and scour the yellow pages for printers.
2. Call them up
3. Get lucky in finding someone who doesn’t charge a download fee (or rather who gets it wrong and so has to go off their word). This mistake on their part saved me a lot of money. Usually it’s $10 a pop/file, this place it was $5 but they guy forgot because it was a ‘new’ thing and so they couldn’t charge me for it. That’s $50 saved.
4. Have an incompetent receptionist (I’m sure she’s good at her job, just not the printing stuff) take your work and follow your very clear typed instructions (badly). While you head off home to do other things while it’s being completed.
5. Return to the printers because of a phonecall. She has printed only two things of the many and the sizing looks suspiciously off.
6. She sits down with you (at the computer) to print the rest of the stuff. For some reason some of the stock standard PDF’s don’t even read on the shonky old PC.
7. She tries to print a simple 1-side A3 and the document is huge and half missing
8. She tries fiddling with the same old settings over and over and over again
9. She goes to answer the phone and lets you on the computer, you do some digging and find a setting that says 150%. You change it to 100%. The document prints fine.
10. Other issues when she goes to print more things. And so on… “I’ll print it in grayscale first so I don’t have to charge you as much”
11. There is a lot of excess paper, you have spent an awful lot of time at the printing place helping the person who should have completed your job.
12. Due to mistakes and files that wouldn’t open, I still have several things that need printing, thankfully they are only A4 and so I can drive to Ron and Anne’s (my parents-in-law’s) tonight to use their laser printer.
13. She charges you less than she probably should, only $30 – maybe because she feels bad and adds an just an extra $4 for ‘proof’s’/mistakes. Wow. Cheap
But worth the hassle?
No freaking way.
…oh and remember those prints that were done at the start? The sizes were wrong, had to redo those too.
You may recall my moaning about packaging design? Besides managing to pass the class, (and I didn’t do too horribly), I found out yesterday that the competition associated with our final products was won by my friend Chloe, who got best in show! This is a fairly impressive feat for a second year student as you are up against 3rd year and PostGrad students for that particular award. I haven’t yet seen her product ‘light and shade’ as I wasn’t in her class and they aren’t up online so far but I will share when they become available.
